Mobile homes punnily / SUN 7-2-23 / Stephen K. ___, British stand-up comedian / Peacock seen on TV / Linguistic group including Zulu and Xhosa / Collegiate beaver mascot whose name is its school spelled backward / Angles above 90 degrees?

Constructor: Rebecca Goldstein and Rafael Musa

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "About Two Feet" — not sure what phrase the title is supposed to be punning on? ... but the basic idea is that different shoe types occupy two tiers of squares, resulting in BIG (because two rows tall?) SHOES TO FILL (115A: High standards established by a predecessor ... or what you are presented with in this puzzle?):

Theme answers:

• "THEELEPHANTMAN"
•  WHEELESTATE  (22A: 1980 film that led to the creation of the Academy Award for Best Makeup / 26A: Mobile homes, punnily)
•    TOLLBOOTHS
• PIRATESBOOTY (32A: Coin toss spots, once / 39A: What "X" could mark on a map)
• SYMBOLICLOGIC
•      NBCLOGO (69A:  In which "P or Q, but not both" is represented as (P∨Q)∧¬(P∧Q) / 74A: Peacock seen on TV)
• "YOUFLATTERME"
• DECAFLATTE (95A: "Stop, I'm blushing" / 103A: Evening coffee order)

Word of the Day: Emily OSTER (123A: Author/economist Emily) —

Emily Fair Oster (born February 14, 1980) is an American economist and author. She is currently the JJE Goldman Sachs University Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, where she has taught since 2015. Her research interests span from development economics and health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Her research has received exposure among non-economists through The Wall Street Journal, the book SuperFreakonomics, and her 2007 TED Talk.

Oster is the author of three books, Expecting Better, The Family Firm, and Cribsheet, which discuss a data-driven approach to decision-making in pregnancy and parenting. (wikipedia)

• • •

As I indicated yesterday, the write-up is going to be a little short today because I'm tired from driving much of the day. Woke up at 4, solved and blogged, fed cats and ate breakfast, then drove to Saratoga Springs to visit my wife (away at a writer's workshop), then bopped around the town for a bit, then drove home again. During the return journey, I was daydreaming or otherwise up in my head and missed the 88 turnoff and was heading toward *&$%-ing Utica (!?) when I realized everything looked ... wrong. Had to take a detour through the backwoodsiest parts of central NY to finally rejoin the 88 and then home feed cats dinner Manhattan and now solving / writing. Blog drive enjoy Saratoga Springs drive blog, that's the day. So my brain does not feel fully up to evaluating / discussing this puzzle. I think I don't quite get the theme. I do get that the shoes are "big" in that they are two stories tall. It's weird, though—since the "shoes" don't occupy one cell, but two different cells, one atop the other, it's more like ... two shoes than "big shoes." And I don't understand the title. What is "About Two Feet" playing on? My Left Foot? About a Boy? Two Left Feet? I feel sure there's a pun in there somewhere, but I can't see it. I keep saying it out loud, over and over: nothing. Anyway, clearly I don't fully appreciate this theme. A few of the theme answers are very nice ("YOU FLATTER ME," THE ELEPHANT MAN), but the theme itself ... I mean which is it? Are there two feet, or is there just one big shoe? I guess ... two feet in the Acrosses, one big shoe in the Downs? NBC LOGO feels forced (fine as clue for PEACOCK, not as an answer unto itself). I've never heard WHEEL ESTATE. Ever. I like it. But it feels made-up. And yet I like it. I want it to be real. So let's say it's real. I actually appreciate the weirdness of the whole theme concept today, but there's something in the execution that just doesn't quite come together for me. Big shoes v. two shoes? What am I supposed to be seeing here?

The things I really like about the grid are smaller, mid-range answers like "BUT WHY?" and TECH HUB and even RED DWARF, PROP BETS and AUTOPAY. Hardest part of the puzzle for me by far was the front end of SYMBOLIC LOGIC (never heard of it—only got SYMBOLIC, in the end, because it's a word I could recognize). The crosses were almost ungettable for me. That NYT clue was baffling to me (61D: Sullivan's opponent in a landmark free speech case: Abbr.) as was this AMOS person, of whom I've never heard (62D: Stephen K. ___, British stand-up comedian). OTOE required first and fourth crosses (73A: ___-Missouria Tribe). So that section was a yikes. Nothing else really rose to the level of threat. No idea about OSTER, so that bottom section could've been dicey, but the crosses were all fair. Had LIE-INS before DIE-INS, so got a bit flustered there (100D: Attention-grabbing protests). It seems like you can spell LAH-DI-DAH all kinds of ways (with and without the various "H"s), so that was interesting (87A: Highfalutin). But overall, it was pretty doable. I mostly enjoyed the solve. Just wish the theme had clicked better for me. Hope you dug the theme more than I did. My cats are screaming at me now, so I gotta go. 

Oh, one last thing. It's a new month, so time to highlight the best NYTXW puzzles of last month (two themed puzzles, and one themeless). So here it is, the Best of June 2023:

• Themed: David, Karen & Paul Steinberg, "Reducing Fractions" (Thu., Jun. 1); Rafael Musa, "Flying Colors" (Sun., Jun. 4) 
• Themeless: Kunal Nabar (MONOPOLY MONEY, MAGICAL REALISM, PALATE CLEANSER, PEOPLE PLEASER) (Fri., Jun. 23) 

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Calling asana "angles" is bizarre (46D: Angles above 90 degrees? = HOT YOGA). Yes, Triangle Pose exists. Still. Bizarre.

P.P.S. Thanks to an invite code from a generous reader, I’m now over at Blue Sky. Hope to see some of you there 😘

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Sassy letter-shaped gesture accompanying a retort / SAT 7-1-23 / Chess ranking system named for a Hungarian physicist / George in aviation slang / German food that's better than it sounds / Classic Beat Generation roman a clef / Popular pet originally from Mongolia / Dutch scientist with an eponymous cloud / Disney villain inspired by drag queen Divine

Constructor: Ben Tolkin

Relative difficulty: Extremely Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Divine (28A: Disney villain inspired by the drag queen Divine => URSULA) —

Harris Glenn Milstead (October 19, 1945 – March 7, 1988), better known by his stage name Divine, was an American actor, singer, and drag queen. Closely associated with independent filmmaker John Waters, Divine was a character actor, usually performing female roles in cinematic and theatrical productions, and adopted a female drag persona for his music career.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a conservative middle-class family, Milstead developed an early interest in drag while working as a women's hairdresser. By the mid-1960s he had embraced the city's countercultural scene and befriended Waters, who gave him the name "Divine" and the tagline of: "The most beautiful woman in the world...almost." Along with his friend David Lochary, Milstead joined Waters' acting troupe, the Dreamlanders, and adopted female roles for their experimental short films Roman Candles (1966), Eat Your Makeup (1968), and The Diane Linkletter Story (1969). Again in drag, he took a lead role in both of Waters' early full-length movies, Mondo Trasho (1969) and Multiple Maniacs (1970), the latter of which attracted press attention for the group. Milstead next starred in Waters' Pink Flamingos(1972), which was a hit on the U.S. midnight movie circuit, became a cult classic, and established Milstead's fame in the American counterculture.

After starring as the lead role in Waters' next film, Female Trouble (1974), Divine moved on to theater, appearing in several avant-garde performances alongside San Francisco drag collective, The Cockettes. He followed this with a performance in Tom Eyen's play Women Behind Bars and its sequel, The Neon Woman. Continuing his cinematic work, he starred in two more of Waters' films, Polyester (1981) and Hairspray (1988), the latter of which represented his breakthrough into mainstream cinema and for which he was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male. [...] 

Described by People magazine as the "Drag Queen of the Century", Divine has remained a cult figure, particularly within the LGBT community, and has provided the inspiration for fictional characters, artworks, and songs. (wikipedia)

• • •

Very short write-up today, as I am driving up to visit my wife at summer camp (i.e. the writing workshop she's attending in Saratoga Springs), and I want to get an early start (you can expect a shortish Sunday write-up too, as I will be exhausted from all the driving between now and then). This puzzle was so easy I got suspicious. I even stopped a couple of times like, "... OK, what's wrong here? Is there gonna be some dumb gimmick that jumps out at me, something where I suddenly realize every answer needs to be written in some special way in order to decode some ridiculous message about, I don't know, the 4th of July or something?" But no. No theme, no gimmick, just the easiest Saturday puzzle I've ever done. Or one of them (I've done a Lot, I can't honestly remember them all). The only answer that caused more than a slight hesitation was BAG End, which I flat-out couldn't remember (41A: ___ End (setting in "The Lord of the Rings")). I saw all those ponderous, humorless, painfully dull LOTR movies and remember virtually nothing about them. So my counterclockwise zip around the grid came to a stop there, but I just went back up top and headed out again, clockwise this time, and off I went again, with absolutely no resistance. It's eerie how easy this is. Is it being marketed to novice solvers with a big "You Can Do This, We Swear" sign, because seriously, get those Saturday-phobes in here to have at this one. You'll have trouble finding a more pliable Saturday in alllll the archives. I put the "S" in at the end of 1D: They're offered seven times a year (SATS), then immediately got CLASH (14A: Don't match). Tried to get 12D: First word in a 13-Across, but the cross-reference made it weird, so I went and got LLOYD'S (seriously, how does 13D: London-based insurance company make it into a Saturday puzzle—that's a Monday clue). After entering (the also perplexingly easy) CHEER and THOR, I went back to the cross-referenced clues and was able to infer that 13A: Present-day request? was a LETTER, and "present-day" made it obvious what kind of letter it was ...

From there, instead of following the LETTER into the east, I burned down the west coast and then back across the middle and south. I had a brief hesitation trying to turn the corner in the SW, as I miswrote Ray ROMANO's name as "ROMERO" (?) and also tried DOG SPA before DOG BED (36D: Certain creature comfort?). But once I got those answers sorted (10-15 seconds??), bam, off I went again—the first letters of those long Acrosses were all I needed to solve every one of them. I did a double take at EYELASH, since I was trying to write in EYELID (apparently both words are "correct" for this idiom). I then winced at ENIGMATOLOGY, which seemed like an embarrassing (though apparently successful) attempt to kiss up to the editor (who famously majored in "ENIGMATOLOGY," a major he invented—google the word and I guarantee you dude shows up on first page of results) (52A: Study of riddles). But one thing I didn't do was struggle. Ever. I mean, there's BAG End, but that wasn't struggle, that was just your ordinary "whoops, don't know this one, better work around it," which I did. I enjoyed the whoosh-whoosh, the Going Very Fast, and I think the top section is pretty good overall, but "SO I GATHERED" is the only answer that felt truly marquee-worthy, though LETTER TO SANTA and BATS AN EYELASH are decent as well. There's nothing wrong with this grid—it's very clean. And there's nothing wrong with having a beginner's level of difficulty on a Saturday every once in a while. Didn't have enough kick for me, but will likely prove delightful to those who really struggle to finish most Saturdays.

Stray comments:

• 33A: Mulligan (REDO) — I know this as golf slang. I think it gets used in non-golf contexts now, though probably primarily by golfers (i.e. not me)
• 7D: Outer ear? (HUSK) — ... of corn
• 45A: NewLeaf Potato, e.g., in brief (GMO) — I wrote in GPS ... I figured maybe this was the GPS that the Nissan Leaf came with? Anyway, Ray Romero I mean ROMANO helped me fix it.
• 27D: "George," in aviation slang (AUTOPILOT) — I did not know this. I like this. Next time you're doing things mindlessly, tell people you're "on George" and let them look at you funny and imagine what drug that is...
• 25D: German food that's better than it sounds? (WURST) — yes! Make puns very bad! The badder the better. Why are some bad puns eye-rollers and groaners and others (like this one) just perfect? It's an enigma! 

Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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